Pelican is configurable thanks to a settings file you can pass to
the command line:

pelicancontent-spath/to/your/pelicanconf.py

If you used the pelican-quickstart command, your primary settings file will
be named pelicanconf.py by default.

Note

When experimenting with different settings (especially the metadata
ones) caching may interfere and the changes may not be visible. In
such cases disable caching with LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE=False or
use the --ignore-cache command-line switch.

Settings are configured in the form of a Python module (a file). There is an
example settings file
available for reference.

All the setting identifiers must be set in all-caps, otherwise they will not be
processed. Setting values that are numbers (5, 20, etc.), booleans (True,
False, None, etc.), dictionaries, or tuples should not be enclosed in
quotation marks. All other values (i.e., strings) must be enclosed in
quotation marks.

Unless otherwise specified, settings that refer to paths can be either absolute
or relative to the configuration file.

The settings you define in the configuration file will be passed to the
templates, which allows you to use your settings to add site-wide content.

When you don’t specify a category in your post metadata, set this setting to
True, and organize your articles in subfolders, the subfolder will
become the category of your post. If set to False, DEFAULT_CATEGORY
will be used as a fallback.

DEFAULT_CATEGORY = 'misc'

The default category to fall back on.

DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU = True

Whether to display pages on the menu of the template. Templates may or may
not honor this setting.

DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU = True

Whether to display categories on the menu of the template. Templates may or
not honor this setting.

DOCUTILS_SETTINGS = {}

Extra configuration settings for the docutils publisher (applicable only to
reStructuredText). See Docutils Configuration settings for more details.

DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = False

Delete the output directory, and all of its contents, before generating
new files. This can be useful in preventing older, unnecessary files from
persisting in your output. However, this is a destructive setting and
should be handled with extreme care.

OUTPUT_RETENTION = []

A list of filenames that should be retained and not deleted from the output
directory. One use case would be the preservation of version control data.

Example:

OUTPUT_RETENTION=[".hg",".git",".bzr"]

JINJA_ENVIRONMENT = {'trim_blocks': True, 'lstrip_blocks': True}

A dictionary of custom Jinja2 environment variables you want to use. This
also includes a list of extensions you may want to include.
See Jinja Environment documentation.

JINJA_FILTERS = {}

A dictionary of custom Jinja2 filters you want to use. The dictionary
should map the filtername to the filter function.

A list of tuples containing the logging level (up to warning) and the
message to be ignored.

Example:

LOG_FILTER=[(logging.WARN,'TAG_SAVE_AS is set to False')]

READERS = {}

A dictionary of file extensions / Reader classes for Pelican to process or
ignore.

For example, to avoid processing .html files, set:

READERS={'html':None}

To add a custom reader for the foo extension, set:

READERS={'foo':FooReader}

IGNORE_FILES = ['.#*']

A list of glob patterns. Files and directories matching any of these
patterns will be ignored by the processor. For example, the default
['.#*'] will ignore emacs lock files, and ['__pycache__'] would
ignore Python 3’s bytecode caches.

MARKDOWN = {...}

Extra configuration settings for the Markdown processor. Refer to the Python
Markdown documentation’s Options section for a complete
list of supported options. The extensions option will be automatically
computed from the extension_configs option.

Base URL of your website. Not defined by default, so it is best to specify
your SITEURL; if you do not, feeds will not be generated with
properly-formed URLs. You should include http:// and your domain, with
no trailing slash at the end. Example: SITEURL='http://mydomain.com'

STATIC_PATHS = ['images']

A list of directories (relative to PATH) in which to look for static
files. Such files will be copied to the output directory without
modification. Articles, pages, and other content source files will normally
be skipped, so it is safe for a directory to appear both here and in
PAGE_PATHS or ARTICLE_PATHS. Pelican’s default settings include the
“images” directory here.

STATIC_EXCLUDES = []

A list of directories to exclude when looking for static files.

STATIC_EXCLUDE_SOURCES = True

If set to False, content source files will not be skipped when copying files
found in STATIC_PATHS. This setting is for backward compatibility with
Pelican releases before version 3.5. It has no effect unless
STATIC_PATHS contains a directory that is also in ARTICLE_PATHS or
PAGE_PATHS. If you are trying to publish your site’s source files,
consider using the OUTPUT_SOURCES setting instead.

TYPOGRIFY = False

If set to True, several typographical improvements will be incorporated into
the generated HTML via the Typogrify library, which can be installed
via: pipinstalltypogrify

TYPOGRIFY_IGNORE_TAGS = []

A list of tags for Typogrify to ignore. By default Typogrify will ignore
pre and code tags. This requires that Typogrify version 2.0.4 or
later is installed

SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH = 50

When creating a short summary of an article, this will be the default length
(measured in words) of the text created. This only applies if your content
does not otherwise specify a summary. Setting to None will cause the
summary to be a copy of the original content.

Regular expression that is used to parse internal links. Default syntax when
linking to internal files, tags, etc., is to enclose the identifier, say
filename, in {} or ||. Identifier between { and } goes
into the what capturing group. For details see
Linking to internal content.

PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS = []

A list of default Pygments settings for your reStructuredText code blocks.
See Syntax highlighting for a list of supported options.

SLUGIFY_SOURCE = 'title'

Specifies where you want the slug to be automatically generated from. Can be
set to title to use the ‘Title:’ metadata tag or basename to use the
article’s file name when creating the slug.

If set to 'reader', save only the raw content and metadata returned by
readers. If set to 'generator', save processed content objects.

CACHE_PATH = 'cache'

Directory in which to store cache files.

GZIP_CACHE = True

If True, use gzip to (de)compress the cache files.

CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD = 'mtime'

Controls how files are checked for modifications.

LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE = False

If True, load unmodified content from caches.

WRITE_SELECTED = []

If this list is not empty, only output files with their paths in this
list are written. Paths should be either absolute or relative to the current
Pelican working directory. For possible use cases see
Writing only selected content.

FORMATTED_FIELDS = ['summary']

A list of metadata fields containing reST/Markdown content to be parsed and
translated to HTML.

The first thing to understand is that there are currently two supported methods
for URL formation: relative and absolute. Relative URLs are useful
when testing locally, and absolute URLs are reliable and most useful when
publishing. One method of supporting both is to have one Pelican configuration
file for local development and another for publishing. To see an example of this
type of setup, use the pelican-quickstart script as described in the
Installation section, which will produce two separate
configuration files for local development and publishing, respectively.

You can customize the URLs and locations where files will be saved. The
*_URL and *_SAVE_AS variables use Python’s format strings. These
variables allow you to place your articles in a location such as
{slug}/index.html and link to them as {slug} for clean URLs (see
example below). These settings give you the flexibility to place your articles
and pages anywhere you want.

Note

If you specify a datetime directive, it will be substituted using the
input files’ date metadata attribute. If the date is not specified for a
particular file, Pelican will rely on the file’s mtime timestamp.
Check the Python datetime documentation for more information.

This would save your articles into something like
/posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/index.html,
save your pages into /pages/about/index.html, and render them available at
URLs of /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/ and /pages/about/,
respectively.

RELATIVE_URLS = False

Defines whether Pelican should use document-relative URLs or not. Only set
this to True when developing/testing and only if you fully understand
the effect it can have on links/feeds.

ARTICLE_URL = '{slug}.html'

The URL to refer to an article.

ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = '{slug}.html'

The place where we will save an article.

ARTICLE_LANG_URL = '{slug}-{lang}.html'

The URL to refer to an article which doesn’t use the default language.

ARTICLE_LANG_SAVE_AS = '{slug}-{lang}.html'

The place where we will save an article which doesn’t use the default
language.

DRAFT_URL = 'drafts/{slug}.html'

The URL to refer to an article draft.

DRAFT_SAVE_AS = 'drafts/{slug}.html'

The place where we will save an article draft.

DRAFT_LANG_URL = 'drafts/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The URL to refer to an article draft which doesn’t use the default language.

DRAFT_LANG_SAVE_AS = 'drafts/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The place where we will save an article draft which doesn’t use the default
language.

PAGE_URL = 'pages/{slug}.html'

The URL we will use to link to a page.

PAGE_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}.html'

The location we will save the page. This value has to be the same as
PAGE_URL or you need to use a rewrite in your server config.

PAGE_LANG_URL = 'pages/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The URL we will use to link to a page which doesn’t use the default
language.

PAGE_LANG_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The location we will save the page which doesn’t use the default language.

CATEGORY_URL = 'category/{slug}.html'

The URL to use for a category.

CATEGORY_SAVE_AS = 'category/{slug}.html'

The location to save a category.

TAG_URL = 'tag/{slug}.html'

The URL to use for a tag.

TAG_SAVE_AS = 'tag/{slug}.html'

The location to save the tag page.

AUTHOR_URL = 'author/{slug}.html'

The URL to use for an author.

AUTHOR_SAVE_AS = 'author/{slug}.html'

The location to save an author.

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = ''

The location to save per-year archives of your posts.

MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = ''

The location to save per-month archives of your posts.

DAY_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = ''

The location to save per-day archives of your posts.

SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS = ()

Substitutions to make prior to stripping out non-alphanumerics when
generating slugs. Specified as a list of 3-tuples of (from,to,skip)
which are applied in order. skip is a boolean indicating whether or not
to skip replacement of non-alphanumeric characters. Useful for backward
compatibility with existing URLs.

AUTHOR_SUBSTITUTIONS = ()

Substitutions for authors. SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS is not taken into account
here!

CATEGORY_SUBSTITUTIONS = ()

Added to SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS for categories.

TAG_SUBSTITUTIONS = ()

Added to SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS for tags.

Note

If you do not want one or more of the default pages to be created (e.g.,
you are the only author on your site and thus do not need an Authors page),
set the corresponding *_SAVE_AS setting to '' to prevent the
relevant page from being generated.

Note

Substitutions are applied in order with the side effect that keeping
non-alphanum characters applies to the whole string when a replacement
is made.

For example if you have the following setting:

SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS=(('C++','cpp'),('keep dot','keep.dot',True))

the string KeepDot will be converted to keep.dot, however
C++willkeepdot will be converted to cppwillkeep.dot instead
of cpp-will-keep.dot!

If you want to keep non-alphanum characters only for tags or categories
but not other slugs then configure TAG_SUBSTITUTIONS and
CATEGORY_SUBSTITUTIONS respectively!

Pelican can optionally create per-year, per-month, and per-day archives of your
posts. These secondary archives are disabled by default but are automatically
enabled if you supply format strings for their respective _SAVE_AS settings.
Period archives fit intuitively with the hierarchical model of web URLs and can
make it easier for readers to navigate through the posts you’ve written over time.

With these settings, Pelican will create an archive of all your posts for the
year at (for instance) posts/2011/index.html and an archive of all your
posts for the month at posts/2011/Aug/index.html.

Note

Period archives work best when the final path segment is index.html.
This way a reader can remove a portion of your URL and automatically
arrive at an appropriate archive of posts, without having to specify
a page name.

DIRECT_TEMPLATES work a bit differently than noted above. Only the
_SAVE_AS settings are available, but it is available for any direct
template.

The default date you want to use. If 'fs', Pelican will use the file
system timestamp information (mtime) if it can’t get date information from
the metadata. If given any other string, it will be parsed by the same
method as article metadata. If set to a tuple object, the default datetime
object will instead be generated by passing the tuple to the
datetime.datetime constructor.

DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT = '%a %d %B %Y'

The default date format you want to use.

DATE_FORMATS = {}

If you manage multiple languages, you can set the date formatting here.

If no DATE_FORMATS are set, Pelican will fall back to
DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT. If you need to maintain multiple languages with
different date formats, you can set the DATE_FORMATS dictionary using
the language name (lang metadata in your post content) as the key.

In addition to the standard C89 strftime format codes that are listed in
Python strftime documentation, you can use the - character between
% and the format character to remove any leading zeros. For example,
%d/%m/%Y will output 01/01/2014 whereas %-d/%-m/%Y will result
in 1/1/2014.

DATE_FORMATS={'en':'%a, %d %b %Y','jp':'%Y-%m-%d(%a)',}

It is also possible to set different locale settings for each language by
using a (locale,format) tuple as a dictionary value which will override
the LOCALE setting:

List of templates that are used directly to render content. Typically direct
templates are used to generate index pages for collections of content (e.g.,
tags and category index pages). If the tag and category collections are not
needed, set DIRECT_TEMPLATES=['index','archives']

PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ['index']

Provides the direct templates that should be paginated.

EXTRA_TEMPLATES_PATHS = []

A list of paths you want Jinja2 to search for templates. Can be used to
separate templates from the theme. Example: projects, resume, profile ...
These templates need to use DIRECT_TEMPLATES setting.

The regexp that will be used to extract any metadata from the filename. All
named groups that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The
default value will only extract the date from the filename.

For example, to extract both the date and the slug:

FILENAME_METADATA='(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'

See also SLUGIFY_SOURCE.

PATH_METADATA = ''

Like FILENAME_METADATA, but parsed from a page’s full path relative to
the content source directory.

Not all metadata needs to be embedded in source file itself. For example, blog posts are often named
following a YYYY-MM-DD-SLUG.rst pattern, or nested into
YYYY/MM/DD-SLUG directories. To extract metadata from the
filename or path, set FILENAME_METADATA or PATH_METADATA to
regular expressions that use Python’s group name notation(?P<name>…).
If you want to attach additional metadata but don’t want to encode
it in the path, you can set EXTRA_PATH_METADATA:

By default, Pelican uses Atom feeds. However, it is also possible to use RSS
feeds if you prefer.

Pelican generates category feeds as well as feeds for all your articles. It does
not generate feeds for tags by default, but it is possible to do so using
the TAG_FEED_ATOM and TAG_FEED_RSS settings:

FEED_DOMAIN = None, i.e. base URL is "/"

The domain prepended to feed URLs. Since feed URLs should always be
absolute, it is highly recommended to define this (e.g.,
“http://feeds.example.com”). If you have already explicitly defined SITEURL
(see above) and want to use the same domain for your feeds, you can just
set: FEED_DOMAIN=SITEURL.

FEED_ATOM = None, i.e. no Atom feed

Relative URL to output the Atom feed.

FEED_RSS = None, i.e. no RSS

Relative URL to output the RSS feed.

FEED_ALL_ATOM = 'feeds/all.atom.xml'

Relative URL to output the all-posts Atom feed: this feed will contain all
posts regardless of their language.

FEED_ALL_RSS = None, i.e. no all-posts RSS

Relative URL to output the all-posts RSS feed: this feed will contain all
posts regardless of their language.

If you want to use FeedBurner for your feed, you will likely need to decide
upon a unique identifier. For example, if your site were called “Thyme” and
hosted on the www.example.com domain, you might use “thymefeeds” as your
unique identifier, which we’ll use throughout this section for illustrative
purposes. In your Pelican settings, set the FEED_ATOM attribute to
thymefeeds/main.xml to create an Atom feed with an original address of
http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml. Set the FEED_DOMAIN
attribute to http://feeds.feedburner.com, or http://feeds.example.com if
you are using a CNAME on your own domain (i.e., FeedBurner’s “MyBrand” feature).

There are two fields to configure in the FeedBurner interface: “Original Feed” and “Feed
Address”. In this example, the “Original Feed” would be
http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml and the “Feed Address” suffix
would be thymefeeds/main.xml.

The default behaviour of Pelican is to list all the article titles along
with a short description on the index page. While this works well for
small-to-medium sites, sites with a large quantity of articles will probably
benefit from paginating this list.

You can use the following settings to configure the pagination.

DEFAULT_ORPHANS = 0

The minimum number of articles allowed on the last page. Use this when you
don’t want the last page to only contain a handful of articles.

DEFAULT_PAGINATION = False

The maximum number of articles to include on a page, not including orphans.
False to disable pagination.

Defines how the articles (articles_page.object_list in the template) are
sorted. Valid options are: metadata as a string (use reversed- prefix
the reverse the sort order), special option 'basename' which will use
the basename of the file (without path) or a custom function to extract the
sorting key from articles. The default value, 'reversed-date', will sort
articles by date in reverse order (i.e. newest article comes first).

PAGE_ORDER_BY = 'basename'

Defines how the pages (PAGES variable in the template) are sorted.
Options are same as ARTICLE_ORDER_BY. The default value, 'basename'
will sort pages by their basename.

Theme to use to produce the output. Can be a relative or absolute path to a
theme folder, or the name of a default theme or a theme installed via
pelican-themes (see below).

THEME_STATIC_DIR = 'theme'

Destination directory in the output path where Pelican will place the files
collected from THEME_STATIC_PATHS. Default is theme.

THEME_STATIC_PATHS = ['static']

Static theme paths you want to copy. Default value is static, but if your
theme has other static paths, you can put them here. If files or directories
with the same names are included in the paths defined in this settings, they
will be progressively overwritten.

CSS_FILE = 'main.css'

Specify the CSS file you want to load.

By default, two themes are available. You can specify them using the THEME
setting or by passing the -t option to the pelican command:

Sometimes, a long list of warnings may appear during site generation. Finding
the meaningful error message in the middle of tons of annoying log output
can be quite tricky. In order to filter out redundant log messages, Pelican
comes with the LOG_FILTER setting.

LOG_FILTER should be a list of tuples (level,msg), each of them being
composed of the logging level (up to warning) and the message to be ignored.
Simply populate the list with the log messages you want to hide, and they will
be filtered out.

For example:

[(logging.WARN,'TAG_SAVE_AS is set to False')]

It is possible to filter out messages by a template. Check out source code to
obtain a template.

For example:

[(logging.WARN,'Empty alt attribute for image %s in %s')]

Warning

Silencing messages by templates is a dangerous feature. It is possible to
unintentionally filter out multiple message types with the same template
(including messages from future Pelican versions). Proceed with caution.

To speed up the build process, Pelican can optionally read only articles
and pages with modified content.

When Pelican is about to read some content source file:

The hash or modification time information for the file from a
previous build are loaded from a cache file if LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE
is True. These files are stored in the CACHE_PATH
directory. If the file has no record in the cache file, it is read
as usual.

The file is checked according to CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD:

If set to 'mtime', the modification time of the file is
checked.

If set to a name of a function provided by the hashlib
module, e.g. 'md5', the file hash is checked.

If set to anything else or the necessary information about the
file cannot be found in the cache file, the content is read as
usual.

If the file is considered unchanged, the content data saved in a
previous build corresponding to the file is loaded from the cache,
and the file is not read.

If the file is considered changed, the file is read and the new
modification information and the content data are saved to the
cache if CACHE_CONTENT is True.

If CONTENT_CACHING_LAYER is set to 'reader' (the default),
the raw content and metadata returned by a reader are cached. If this
setting is instead set to 'generator', the processed content
object is cached. Caching the processed content object may conflict
with plugins (as some reading related signals may be skipped) and the
WITH_FUTURE_DATES functionality (as the draft status of the
cached content objects would not change automatically over time).

Checking modification times is faster than comparing file hashes,
but it is not as reliable because mtime information can be lost,
e.g., when copying content source files using the cp or rsync
commands without the mtime preservation mode (which for rsync
can be invoked by passing the --archive flag).

The cache files are Python pickles, so they may not be readable by
different versions of Python as the pickle format often changes. If
such an error is encountered, it is caught and the cache file is
rebuilt automatically in the new format. The cache files will also be
rebuilt after the GZIP_CACHE setting has been changed.

The --ignore-cache command-line option is useful when the
whole cache needs to be regenerated, such as when making modifications
to the settings file that will affect the cached content, or just for
debugging purposes. When Pelican runs in autoreload mode, modification
of the settings file will make it ignore the cache automatically if
AUTORELOAD_IGNORE_CACHE is True.

Note that even when using cached content, all output is always
written, so the modification times of the generated *.html files
will always change. Therefore, rsync-based uploading may benefit
from the --checksum option.

When only working on a single article or page, or making tweaks to
your theme, it is often desirable to generate and review your work
as quickly as possible. In such cases, generating and writing the
entire site output is often unnecessary. By specifying only the
desired files as output paths in the WRITE_SELECTED list,
only those files will be written. This list can be also specified
on the command line using the --write-selected option, which
accepts a comma-separated list of output file paths. By default this
list is empty, so all output is written. See Site generation for
more details.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-from__future__importunicode_literalsAUTHOR='Alexis Métaireau'SITENAME="Alexis' log"SITEURL='http://blog.notmyidea.org'TIMEZONE="Europe/Paris"# can be useful in development, but set to False when you're ready to publishRELATIVE_URLS=TrueGITHUB_URL='http://github.com/ametaireau/'DISQUS_SITENAME="blog-notmyidea"REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER=TrueLOCALE="C"DEFAULT_PAGINATION=4DEFAULT_DATE=(2012,3,2,14,1,1)FEED_ALL_RSS='feeds/all.rss.xml'CATEGORY_FEED_RSS='feeds/%s.rss.xml'LINKS=(('Biologeek','http://biologeek.org'),('Filyb',"http://filyb.info/"),('Libert-fr',"http://www.libert-fr.com"),('N1k0',"http://prendreuncafe.com/blog/"),('Tarek Ziadé',"http://ziade.org/blog"),('Zubin Mithra',"http://zubin71.wordpress.com/"),)SOCIAL=(('twitter','http://twitter.com/ametaireau'),('lastfm','http://lastfm.com/user/akounet'),('github','http://github.com/ametaireau'),)# global metadata to all the contentsDEFAULT_METADATA={'yeah':'it is'}# path-specific metadataEXTRA_PATH_METADATA={'extra/robots.txt':{'path':'robots.txt'},}# static paths will be copied without parsing their contentsSTATIC_PATHS=['pictures','extra/robots.txt',]# custom page generated with a jinja2 templateTEMPLATE_PAGES={'pages/jinja2_template.html':'jinja2_template.html'}# code blocks with line numbersPYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS={'linenos':'table'}# foobar will not be used, because it's not in caps. All configuration keys# have to be in capsfoobar="barbaz"